The future role of the CFO?

We have seen first-hand how the pace of change in technology has had a significant impact on business and most especially on finance functions.

In the Mid 80’s Global IT spending stood at over $340 billion. In slightly over 20 years, the Global IT spend stood at approx. €560 billion … and by 2016, more than 2.1 billion devices will have the HTML5 browsers.

The result of the developments in IT have meant that the role of CFO, over the past 30 years has evolved from a pure Book-keeping and Accounting function to one where the CFO is continually asked “How can finance add more value?”

However there is now a growing body of thought that these answers are not the complete answer!

With the advent of “Cloud Computing + Big Data” … one picture that is emerging from a number of recent ‘discussion papers’ is that, in the not too distant future, the role of CFO maybe more appropriately entitled the CPO (Chief Performance Officer).

Key responsibilities may include;
o Mining Big Data to identify performance improvements
o Building more robust forecasts based upon competitor / market actions
o Providing real time information to all stakeholders
o Putting finance skills into the business (rather than business skills into finance)

With the development of better and better technology, there may also be an increased move away from;
o Transactional activities – Data Processing
o Data Gathering for reports
o Manual spreadsheet manipulation for reporting

So some of the challenges that you will need to consider into the future will be;
o What can you do to keep the role of CFO relevant to the future needs of your organisation?
o If the Finance function, as we currently understand it, no longer exists as a separate function … how will you continue to develop ‘talent’?
o As the level of automation increases, what role will the CFO play?
o What are the new career paths that may ‘open-up’ to you?